Hannibal Buress Was Funny Long Before Bill Cosby Wasn't

He's been killing it in comedy clubs for over a decade. He's written for SNL and 30 Rock, he's been an ace sidekick, an awards-show host, and a brutally honest celebrity roaster. Now, finally, he's got his own show on Comedy Central, so now, finally, it's time to talk about…Bill Cosby. Taffy Brodesser-Akner explains how Hannibal Buress stole the spotlight from himself

Just in case you were wondering—and you weren't—it is not easy to put names up on a marquee, different ones every day, especially at a place like The Comedy Store. If you've never passed that particular marquee on Sunset Boulevard, if you've never seen it through the cloud of marijuana smoke that emanates from beneath it, it's two-sided, totally analog, five different names per night, each painstakingly applied, letter by letter, by the kind of comedy-upstart tweaky stoner lackey kid whom I happen to be engaged in conversation with at this very minute.

It is evening, and I've been overhearing him tell passersby that Hannibal Buress, the Hannibal Buress, is going to be here tonight, totally stealth, almost like a secret show. I ask the lackey why, given the relative paucity of marquee names worth trumpeting on a comedy-club marquee, Hannibal's isn't up there. The lackey confides to me that he had just finished putting up Hannibal's name that morning—his least favorite part of the day, in case we haven't established that already—when he got a call to take Hannibal's name down. "He's trying out some new material," the lackey stage-whispers, and obviously it is well-known that well-known comics at Hannibal's level don't try out new stuff loudly; they do it quietly.

"But also"—and here the lackey summons the air of someone who knows things—"it's the Cosby stuff. He's paranoid about it."

Hannibal Buress is famous now. He was already getting pretty famous before the Cosby stuff blew up, but now it's to the point where people want to talk to him all the time, and this is not easy for him. They approach him at concerts when he's just trying to enjoy the show, just "vibing out, motherfucker." There was an incident in April where a guy who wanted a picture wouldn't wait for Buress to finish a "top-five-ever" plate of post-show wings at a bar near the venue and kept nagging at him until Buress manually refunded the guy's ticket by throwing $26 into his face.

Still, he tells me after his set at The Comedy Store, he is trying to be nicer. He is trying to breathe through the frustration of people being too enthusiastic/too wrong/too human around him. Sometimes people recognize him from Broad City—he plays Ilana Glazer's not-quite-boyfriend, Lincoln—and they'll call him by his character's name, and usually he's like, "That's not my name. That's a character I play on TV." But he's softening. The next time it happens, "I think I might just go, ‘Hey, what's up?’ "

When I tell Buress what the lackey kid said to me—that his name isn't on the marquee because of the Cosby stuff—he registers it with less annoyance than I expected. His face is a little inscrutable, the defining characteristic of his countenance being a not-typical-of-comics laconic chill, but he barely rolls his eyes at this.

"That's not why," he says. "It's because they're not paying me enough."

If they want to put his name on the marquee, Buress tells me, he has to be headlining. Even if it's just for a secret show, the tickets need to cost what tickets to a Hannibal Buress show cost. He would have brought the DJ he travels with if this were a Hannibal Buress show. He might have hired some ballerinas, which is also a thing he does on occasion, but only when it's a Hannibal Buress show. Nah, this is just a quick set, in and out.

In the past year, Buress has gone from cult comic to mainstream star. He was already familiar to people who watch Broad City or The Eric Andre Show, which he's co-hosted for three years, or who listen to podcasts like Marc Maron's or The Nerdist or The Joe Rogan Experience. He'd done time in the writers' room on Saturday Night Live ("It wasn't for me. I didn't apply myself as much as I could've. Maybe I didn't enjoy the place that much") and 30 Rock ("30 Rock I enjoyed—they'd probably say nice things about me, but they won't say that I was a great sitcom writer"). Then came the hour-long specials, and slowly the venues went from clubs to sold-out theaters. He went from don't-I-know-you-from-somewhere to oh-my-God-it's-Hannibal-Buress. Now he has his own show on Comedy Central, Why? with Hannibal Buress, a weekly variety show of sorts that incorporates man-on-the-street interviews, filmed segments, and bits of his stand-up.

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This steady rise was already peaking last fall when some shaky footage surfaced online of a bit Buress had been doing for a few weeks, one in which he mentions that Bill Cosby has no real right to tell black people how to behave—to pull up their pants and so forth—because "you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches." The shock of the line would always get a laugh, and in case anyone thought he was just joking, he would double down: "When you leave here, Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ That shit has more results than ‘Hannibal Buress.’ "

Now, we'd known, or at least kind of known, about Cosby. We'd heard accusations. Yet somehow the world hadn't been ready to face the possibility that our own Dr. Huxtable—do you remember that he played an obstetrician? a specialty in which one drugs women and handles their genitals, a big fuck-you to us all—the man who made TV safe for middle-class black families, was raping women. But it was a different time now. Hannibal had shaken us awake. We were listening.

The clip was passed around by just about everyone with a Facebook account, and suddenly, a storm: CNN panels were convened night after night. More than forty women came forward to tell their frighteningly similar stories about how Cosby had allegedly drugged and assaulted them. State laws were changed to extend statutes of limitation from what they were when we'd first ignored allegations that Cosby was a demented excuse for a human. CBS News posted a story called "Who is Hannibal Buress, and why did he call Bill Cosby a ‘rapist’?"

And, says Buress, it halted Comedy Central's announcement of Hannibal's new TV show. The hope was to put a pin in the press release until the craziness died down, until Hannibal Buress's name was no longer associated with that sick fucker Bill Cosby's.

But that never happened—at least, it still hasn't—and so when the show was finally announced, Buress got tweets and e-mails that said things like, "You fucking sold out Cosby and now you got a show." Because, reader, there are still people rooting for Bill Cosby. "This deal closed, like, June of last year," Buress says. "That person can't be argued with."

Hannibal Buress was on the debate team in high school in Chicago when he realized he could make people laugh. I tell you this in order to emphasize that congeniality maybe doesn't come so naturally to a guy whose main comedic jam is parsing things people say and do and then correcting them. "I wouldn't say I'm combative," he says, "but, like, when people say something that's wrong, I'm one to correct them." Buress is like the smart-aleck kid brother who harps on your every error and hyperbolic moment, and who would be insufferable if he weren't incredibly funny. But as I said: He's learning, taking it one day at a time. (He hates that phrase, by the way, "taking it one day at a time": "You know who else is? Everybody. Cuz that's how time works. That's the only way you can take time.")

I'd first met Buress at the production offices for Why? on the Paramount lot. He greeted me warmly, and when I sat down and pulled my tape recorder out, he pulled out his iPhone and hit record, too. "Isn't this what Beyoncé does?" he asked me. His office is corporate, standard-issue Paramount, a used couch and a cheap desk and a wipeboard with ideas on it like "Urban Elephant Joke Jam" and "Coffee Civil Rights."

He wore a large gold Orefici watch and a black Hundreds T-shirt, jeans, and gray ankle boots. His appearance has changed over the years. He's gotten Lasik, and also veneers—his "TV teeth," as he calls them—to correct the gap in the front. He tells me he plans to slim down for the show because he's worried that he's gotten fat. I tell him he can do that because he's a man, just lose weight at a moment's notice, and he tells me, no, he can do it because he is capable of hard work.

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I had been warned going in that Buress would shut down if I brought up the Cosby stuff. That's not true. It's that he'll shut down if you ask him stupid questions about the Cosby stuff. He'll talk about it when he can be funny. (At Justin Bieber's roast: "I hate your music more than Bill Cosby hates my comedy.") And he'll talk about it when he's asked thoughtfully. (To Howard Stern: "That wasn't my intention, to make it a part of a big discussion. It was just something I was doing at that venue right then.") But when he was doing a phone interview in March to promote a show in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the reporter alluded to it in a way that Buress didn't like, he hung up on the guy. "I don't want to talk about it with you" is how he explained the incident to me, "[because you're] being a dick."

I asked him if he regretted that Cosby bit, and he said he didn't, because "you can't predict shit like that." But I pressed him. Did he realize he was a feminist hero? I actually said that: "You are a feminist hero," I told him, and meanwhile he smiled slightly and looked down and bobbed his head slowly like he was considering something. "People are going to put on you whatever they want to put on you. It is conflicting, because people think I'm like this amazing guy or something." He laughs. "I'm a decent guy." The thing is, though, he's not in comedy to be decent—he's in it to be funny. And he's realizing how hard it is for people to think of you as funny when your name keeps showing up in sentences alongside the word rape.

He is too smart at this point to pontificate on Bill Cosby with a tape recorder running. He's done enough interviews to know that a quote you never give cannot be taken out of context. Still, the net result is the same: You open up your GQ, and the Hannibal Buress story is about Bill Cosby. I hope Buress will like it, but if he doesn't, I hope he'll understand. He brought something we'd ignored to national attention. He helped begin the closure process for possibly dozens of victims. And he did all of it while being funny. What kind of comedian's estimation of himself does not leave room for a random monologue to change the world?

And yet, finally, despite his efforts to be nicer, to be more forgiving, to let go, he spreads his arms out wide and looks up at the ceiling and says not so much to me but to everyone, everywhere: "I don't know what the fuck else you want me to say."

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